Her pictures show her as a pale-skinned, fine-featured beauty, brown hair sometimes wispy, sometimes neatly coiffed, slender and tall in elegant high couture. She was born in England to a cardiologist father and a retired diplomat mother and grew up in west London’s Acton suburb, attended King’s College, and worked in investment banking in London. Her parents are Syrian and in 2000 she married into a famous Syrian family and moved to Syria where she has lived ever since. She is Asma al-Assad, the 38-year old wife of Syrian president Bashar-al-Assad.

Till the brutal civil war convulsed Syria in 2011, the Western media were enchanted by Asma, fascinated by her style, her sophistication, and most of all by her combination of English upbringing and Eastern location: sparkling modernity mediating dynastic privilege. An adulatory profile in Vogue magazine of March 2011, titled “A Rose in the Desert”, celebrated her as “glamorous, young and very chic — the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies”, “a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind and an energetic grace”, a devoted mother of three, also engaged in the promotion of Syrian culture and projects for the youth.

Soon after the article’s appearance, Syria erupted — vicious cycles of uprisings and ferocious reprisals developing into the regional and sectarian war that has claimed over 100,000 lives, displaced millions, partitioned cities, ruined fabled monuments and now awaits American retaliation for alleged chemical weapons use. President Assad’s ruthless tactics and slaughter of opponents have understandably been condemned. But the Western media seem to particularly revel in denouncing Asma; her allure has wilted under the scorching view of her as either indifferent to or complicit in the brutalities of her husband’s regime.

Vogue rapidly recanted its glowing story, deleting it from the internet. When hacked emails revealed her purchasing luxury furnishings, jewellery and Louboutin shoes, she was disparaged as a callous Lady Macbeth and Marie Antoinette. The media were gratified when the European Union imposed a travel ban and assets freeze on her. Most recently, widely-published Instagram photos of Asma doing charity work — ladling food in a soup kitchen, comforting refugee children — prompted varying degrees of irony, scorn and fury. In truth, none of this is surprising. Celebrities often tumble from media favour, and Asma’s fall was guaranteed when she failed to distance herself from the reviled figure of her husband.

However, it is striking that Asma seems to have been singled out among first ladies for scrutiny and opprobrium occasioned principally by a husband’s misdeeds. Asma is consistently held accountable for the suffering in Syria, though it’s never entirely clear whether hers is a guilt by commission or association. A writer in London’s Daily Telegraph wondered at length whether she willingly supports her husband’s policies or is “at the mercy of events which have spiralled out of control”. Such accusations or speculations rarely confront other first ladies. Endless comments are addressed to Michelle Obama’s hair-styles and dresses, but they are never about her opinion of the drone strikes ordered by her husband. During George Bush and Tony Blair’s administrations, Laura Bush or Cherie Blair were never subjected to questions about whether they endorsed the excesses of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, torture and rendition.

There was one exception, however. In 2006, the highly acclaimed poet, Sharon Olds, declined an invitation from Laura Bush to attend a National Book Festival which included a breakfast at the White House. In her open letter to the American first lady, Sharon Olds explained, “I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning… the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush administration.” Interestingly, if Sharon Olds implicates Laura Bush in the former president’s decisions, it is tangential; the poet is more concerned about not implicating herself. Moreover, I recall watching with bemusement as Sharon Olds was chastised by television pundits for being so ungracious to the genial Laura Bush, innocent admirer of books and poets, seen benignly smiling at her husband’s side, but uncontaminated by the atrocities of his wars on terror.

Therefore, no United Nations ambassadors’ wives had presumed to send a plea for peace in Iraq to the Mistresses Bush and Blair, unlike the British and German ambassadors’ wives who released a four-minute video urging Asma al-Assad to intervene to end the bloodshed in Syria. The video petition (supposedly from women “all over the world”) asks poignantly and pointedly, “What happened to you, Asma?”

The implicit disappointment in the sorrowful question informs most portrayals of Asma. What has “happened” to her, it is lamented, is a deviation from a much-valued component of her identity — her British heritage. Being British-born and educated had earlier constituted her cosmopolitan charms, her intellectual abilities, her progressive projects ; now her British birth increases the anguish and anger at her seeming complicity in the Assad regime’s brutality. Surely, the articles seem to suggest, someone who studied at King’s College and speaks the Queen’s English should have imbibed and retained the moral probity and rational judgment that the West assumes are its inalienable Enlightenment qualities.

Such assumptions defined colonial ideology and its missionary imperatives: that Western values and culture were more civilized; that exposure to them ennobled and uplifted subject races. Thomas Macaulay, in his 1837 “Minute on Indian education”, advocated the teaching of English to create “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour; but English in tastes, in opinion, in morals and in intellect”, convinced that native “barbarousness” could be ameliorated by English culture, and thus justify English colonial power. Numerous horrors perpetrated by the exercise of that power and recent neo-imperial history have demonstrated that such self-righteous colonial constructs are illusions, yet their mythical force remains tenacious. In June this year, after a protracted legal process, the British government agreed to pay reparations to thousands of Kenyan freedom fighters its colonial administration had detained and tortured in concentration camps in the 1950s. In spite of such records of human rights violations, the British (along with their ally, the United States of America) still claim the moral high ground to condemn and punish violations elsewhere.

Asma al-Assad deserted that moral high ground made available by her English antecedents. Her critics are appalled at her multiple betrayals: she betrayed their cherished image of her as embodying superior Western values; she betrayed England and King’s College by either not learning the values well enough or abandoning them under duress. She should have been like the soldier of Rupert Brooke’s World War I poem of the same name whom “England bore, shaped, made aware” and all foreign ground she occupied should have been transformed into “forever England”. Instead, she committed the abhorred colonial transgression of “going native”, entering and embracing debased foreign spaces and practices.

There’s no question that proximity to power should entail the concern to see it applied fairly, honourably, for the greatest good. No question that rejection of violence, human rights abuses and the sufferings of others is incumbent upon our humanity. There is every reason to hope and expect that Asma al-Assad would share such beliefs. But not just because she lived in Acton and was educated at King’s College and carries the white man’s dubious burden.